How To Trim A Black Eyed Susan

Now I've disbudded all of the flowers off of this really large plant. The next step is to start down at the base. You can see there's some small new growth coming up. I want to eliminate some of these leaves to help reduce on that transplant shock that I keep talking about. What I'm going to do is take my scissors and I'm just going to start trimming back the large leaves of the plant. You can see there's stems there and there's still little other baby leaves that are the way at the bottom of the base. We do this so that more energy goes into the root system so it can get rooted before winter comes. You can see here how it's crowding this little lavender plant. It's spreading faster than the lavender is. I'm just going to take it back in the areas that I want to dig up and move. Some of the leaves I might take and just cut in half to reduce some of the shock. I'm going to take a little bit more back because there's a fairly large clump here. You can see there's a quite big pile of leaves. Don't feel like you're killing your plant by taking the leaves out. You're really just helping it stimulate rooting. Before you know it when this plant flushes out new growth, you won't even see any of these stems. It'll just be a whole new sea of leaves again.